The world is waking up from a long stupid slumber...

[NNadir]

11. The rhetoric in the google result is rather nonsensical.

Last edited Sun Apr 30, 2023, 06:07 PM - Edit history (1)

A personal remark: Anyone who asks a question rather than reciting an inflexible dogmatic assertion about a topic about which they know very little, is not ditzy. Do not sell yourself short. I appreciate the question.

I recently gave a lecture to a scientific group touching on Hanford, built, in part, around things I learned when writing this (highly technical) post: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels (It contains about 25 references to papers in the primary scientific literature.)

If Hanford is such a "disaster" one should at least be able to explain why Portland, Oregon, just down the river, has the highest life expectancy in the United States, or what environmental outcomes have been caused by radiation released from it. The people who live in Richland, Washington, the home of many of the scientists working at Hanford and at the marvelous Pacific Northwest Laboratory are leading useful productive lives. Where exactly is the death toll? Does every animal that roams in with the confines of the plant die a horrible death. Are the bird kills from radiation anywhere near the bird kills of the average wind industrial park?

I have a rather extensive journal on this website, and I've touched on why solar energy - despite popular enthusiasm for it - is a very dirty and expensive enterprise.

There are many reasons for this. One is the low energy to mass ratio; it takes a huge amount of chemical processing to produce a solar cell, including the energy to reduce silicon (or in other cases, metals) to their elemental state. This is generally undertaken by the use of heat, precisely that unreliable electricity cannot provide.

You will hear from the fools who support this enterprise about "EROI" "energy returned on energy invested." It is true that this is positive for solar junk, but it is not true enough.

A kilogram of plutonium contains about 80 trillion Joules when fully fissioned. This is the equivalent of 2,500 tons of coal, 21 rail cars full, 2,080 m3 crude oil (17,500 barrels, 2,080,000 liters, 730,000 gallons). One can easily understand why the solar industry is not sustainable by simply asking the mass required to produce 80 trillion joules in a single day. (A large nuclear reactor consumes a few kilos of fuel a day.)

The lifetime of solar cells is generally reported to be between 20 to 25 years. This means they all need to be replaced regularly. There's a lot of talk about recycling what they become - electronic waste - but almost no practical low energy industrial infrastructure to do so. It's all soothsaying. We cannot afford to live by reading crystal balls.

Each year, about 45 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere. The majority of this, between 35 to 37 billion metric tons is dangerous fossil fuel waste, but the balance is from land use changes.

Huge stretches of land, some of it pristine wilderness, some of it farmland, are being industrialized to provide industrial parks for solar junk. It all needs to be installed by people carrying huge amounts of mass on trucks, serviced similarly, dismantled and hauled away (if not allowed to rot in place.)

The worst thing about the solar fantasy is its lack of reliability. Solar junk is subject to something called "night" as well as stuff called "snow" and things like "clouds," "dust" and the like. You'll hear a lot to excuse this awful reality from people who hype stuff like batteries and hydrogen and other very, very, very, very bad ideas.

Some of the most important scientific laws - laws not subject to repeal by legislators - are the laws of thermodynamics.

In the link in the OP to the situation at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory data from this morning, is an account of how much money has been squandered on solar and wind this century. The results of this tragic waste of money and resources are in: The atmosphere is degrading faster than ever.

My journal here is filled with related commentary: NNadir's Journal

It can be overly technical, but it details my strong objections to the awful reactionary idea associated with so called "renewable energy." The very name, "renewable energy" is an oxymoron.

Thanks for your question.